I've become a "computer audiophile"!

I don’t use shuffle features very often, but I spend hours and hours creating playlists. I love everything about it. I listen to plenty of albums front to back, but I love the challenge of creating some sort of theme and trying to piece a cohesive and well-flowing playlist together that sticks to the theme. I didn’t realize people are so adverse to this.

 

There are so many different sorts of listeners. Like my wife is a completely different sort of listener than me. She just dumps every song she's ever listened to in a Spotify playlist and let is play, she mostly puts music on when she's doing other things -- like when she's cleaning -- and she mostly doesn't ever listen to music unless she's also singing along with it. She might like some kind of intelligent shuffle feature if it were just a service building into a streaming service , maybe, but she'd have no interest in putting any time, work, effort or thought into it. But I'm not sure she'd have an interest in being surprised by what's next. She likes to listen to familiar music, though she is a listener to radio in the car.

My daughter, she's an Apple Music user and a playlist maker. She's a casual listener and makes lifestyle playlists --for workouts, for subway commuting, for holidays, etc. She might enjoy some degree of randomness and surprise in her music listening. And she's young, so she's more in the growth for the future part of the market.

Me? I'm not really looking for variety or a mix of music in my listening. I listen to music only when I want to hear a particular thing. I do occasionally listen to the radio, only when I'm in the car and mostly to listen to shows that have a tight content focus and ideally where I can learn something -- Baroque and Beyond on SiriusXM, Bird Flight, dedicated to Charlie Parker's music, on WKCR weekday mornings. But mostly I only put on music if I have some specific interest in hearing that music -- I've been made curious about by something I read; I know the artist or composer and have a general interest in their work; etc.

 

It is a solution for all sorts of physical disc shortcomings. I'm confident you can contemplate this and conclude the same. Shuffle isn't of interest to me, but I can appreciate the notion. As for playlists, well, it takes little effort to appreciate that.

 

Music fans and audiophiles frequently have an aversion to any notion which may "invalidate" prior experience.

I'm hoping that this thread can become a stand out much like the many vinyl rig threads where it is ok to spend time and money on gear and the like. Nearly everyone agrees that the upgrades deliver in those threads and it is acceptable to express healthy envy.

 

Great job @jh901, that's one heck of a leap into the computer audio world! I remember checking out the older model DMS-550 back in 2019 and thinking this was very good except for the lack of a USB input which I see they have since remedied. The AKM 4499 DAC inside is one of the current state-of-the-art and I would not be too quick to think that dCS necessarily will perform/sound any better. Make sure to compare side by side and make sure to control the volume if you're thinking of upgrading.

As one who has jumped on board the "computer audio" side of the hobby since the early 2000's and now have a lifetime Roon account (last 3 years), I would never go back to physical formats other than to check out an album once awhile. Computer audio with a streamer like this IMO sounds better, more convenient, more power with quality DSP processing, highly mature in many ways these days.

The only thing more convenient is signing up for a music streaming service. I personally still like "owning" my own library on the server computer.

Congrats again and enjoy!

 

From the title I thought this was about the many people who seem to mainly listen to music from the computer through headphones. i don't use headphones but I do stream mp3 quality when I'm on the computer. Dac, tripath amp, speakers.
I also stream on the HT system sometimes, but no lossless.

When I want to really enjoy the music and delve deeply in I go to the big system. I don't stream there at all. Originally, i just didn't think our streaming here in the woods was of a good enough quality to work properly, without spooling, interruptions. Now though, our streaming is vastly improved and Im thinking about adding streaming to my 2ch system. I have to admit, I don't like the idea of paying monthly for that. Essentially it's renting.

 

Good for you. It’s nice that u know what u want. A lot if people never have that revelation.

I’m a vinyl guy myself. That’s prob due to age and nostalgia as much as anything else. To each his (or her) own.

 

I am currently in the **** end of nowhere and with my Macbook Pro and Chord Mojo with a pair of Sennheiser I am able to take my entire music library and (near) reference quality sound with me!

Fantastic.

 

Let's be clear that I and others are primarily advocating LOCAL playback. My Roon core and library sit in the same Intel NUC (on separate SSDs of course). Theres no outside internet involved.

It is true that Qobuz or the like require reliable broadband, but most of us in this site have nice music collections.

So, don't let your broadband scare you off! Follow this thread...

 

I still use Qobuz but I much prefer to have a personal library that I own.

 

Surely an oxymoron?

 

Certainly not.

 

I stream as a service a lot and Ive been looking into a transporter system for that rather than jacking a laptop into my DAC. But I like have a service like Qobuz handling all the loading and metadata and serving and interoperability etc.

 

Yeah, there are any number who only want a streaming service. Seems a perfect gateway for an eventual transition into a server.

Consider Bluesound Node 2i. It has a DAC, but also digital outputs for your DAC. Simply attach Ethernet.

That's a bit entry level, sure, but may suffice for Qobuz.

 

Yeah. I'll never be a music server user. I have 4K CDs, and around the same number of LPs. Back in the '90s, with personal digital audio was the thing, I spent some time ripping stuff and I found it one of the most tedious and unrewarding grinds of a way to spend my time imaginable. I'd almost rather do anything else. Plus I pretty much do all of my listening in one room. I play one thing at a time, I don't jump around from title to title or track to track. And I do want to listen elsewhere, I have the streaming services (I keep a Spotify, Deezer and Qobuz sub, because of different libraries and different family members who have differing uses for the services). To me, putting a CD in a player is enormously more pleasurable than ripping a CD and maintaining a server and worrying about backup storage. I can play the music I can already play without any of those extra steps and extra hardware. I'm not a technophobe by any means. But for me, setting up a music server for music I can already play is something that offers no utility. But I've been looking into something like the Allo USBrigde just as a streaming transporter. Ripping my CDs to a server would be a chore, but a streaming transporter would would be a great convenience. I will say, I AM buying more downloads now than before, if there's something I want that's not streaming. So, that's something I might ultimately want local storage for.

 

We will have to disagree about optical disc spinning. The ultimate would be vinyl for physical and server for a large digital library. Plus Qobuz or the like.

Allo Signature
(review link)

 

It's a lifestyle choice. A music server doesn't add anything to my lifestyle other than the chore of ripping thousands of CDs and dealing with network configuration, storage, backup, of material I already have on a stable storage platform, the CDs themselves. It doesn't really add anything I'll use in my listening practices. For others who do different sorts of listening -- like who listen to mixed playlists, or listen in multiple rooms -- I understand they have preferences that aren't really relevant to me.

Vinyl to me is something I keep because I have thousands of LPs from the LP era and because there's music I want to hear that's not available on digital formats. But I don't buy new vinyl. I think vinyl can sound good, but it's an enormous pain in the ass to maintain and store and the intrusive mechanical noise of vinyl playback is always a distraction. I'm pretty format agnostic, I choose whatever I need to choose to hear the music I want to listen to, but for me, streaming service is choice one, CD choice 2, download choice three, vinyl choice 4.

But as a fully committed user of music streaming services -- my primary interest is in always hearing new and new-to-me music (and I'm curious about hundreds of new titles a year), not so much in going back and listening to old favorites over and over again, so streaming services are fabulous for me -- I to have my eyes out of an inexpensive, easy to configure, network transport for streaming services and to play downloaded titles.

 

I've been enjoying this ride. I sold my entire vinyl setup after I got a Merging NADAC. I listen to more music now than I have at any other point in my life ever!

Buying more music as well as listening to music is just so pleasurable now. I actually don't have any streaming connected to this system, it's just my CDs and SACDs that are ripped.

 

Nope. I use Qobuz to sample and select. I then acquire the download of my selections.

 

I would suggest that they're not as much "adverse" to it, as...it never occurred to them to do that kind of "work" to realize the benefit.

The same is with the concept of developing a playlist with an intention to just shuffle it. The "surprise" is a true benefit. In fact, with every flash drive I load for driving our second car (the older one doesn't have the feature), I always use the "RDM" (random) command when I play it.

You control your music, but you get a better listening result from not being in "total" control. Again, this is decades of radio listener study that confirm it for me (it's not that they want to know what's coming...they just want some sort of an assurance it's not gonna suck...).

 

i've been happy with my allo digione- it's basically the same thing as the usbridge but a spdif output rather than usb. sounds great- I use it to connect my old receiver in the living room to Roon+Qobuz

 

If it's as good as the Allo DigiOne, it is a very good choice, cost-effective and with good sound quality.

 

I don't know if its an aversion, more just kind of disinterest from me. Like every now and then I'll make a playlist that helps me make sense of things -- like Duke Ellington in the 1920s recorded the same material in similar time frame for multiple different labels so I made a playlists of my favorite of the classic versions of, like The Mooche and Black and Tan Fantasy and East St. Louis Toodle-Oo and Black Beauty, etc from those various dates rather than having to go to one album of Okeh material, another album of Victor material, another album of Vocalion material.

A couple of years ago I was on a binge listening to Arsenio Rodriguez's '40s Cuban singles, but they were available on a bunch of different anthologies in no clear order, so I made a Qobuz playlist of all of 'em in chrono order. So that was useful to me during my Arsenio Rodriguez binge.

But I don't listen to like one different thing then another different thing than another different thing. And if I did, I wouldn't want to listen to the same set of different things a second time, so that kind of playlist has no appeal for me.

I wasn't much of a mixtape maker in the '80s either. In my 20s I sometimes did that king of listening -- it was the vinyl era so I would spin one album track or single after another for a couple of hours. But I haven't been that kind of active listener in 30 years. I'm also mostly a jazz and classical listener at this point in my life. So you know, I'm not a playlist maker or a playlist listener.

 

Brief network audio explainer within the context of Roon (LINK).

I'm using an Intel NUC as a music server. Roon Optimized Core Kit (ROCK), which was developed with Linux, sits on an M.2 SSD. I have 16 GB RAM (2x8) and a 4TB SATA SSD for my WAV and, eventually, DSF files. The ethernet out from my customized NUC connects to my Cary Audio DMS-700 where Roon's software development kit has been implemented (includes endpoint code and RAAT). So, I'm not using Cary's own rendering solution or music library management software. The article relates this using dCS Rossini as an example. I would buy a Rossini for the power supply and analog stage design in addition to their proprietary D/A conversion and not for rendering or library management. I'd get Roon just as the author mentions and as I've done with the Cary.

There are few proprietary solutions that beat Roon all-around. NAD uses BluOS, for example, but I'd guess that many end up with a Roon subscription. Auralic's is Lightning OS. The best I'm aware of based on testimonials is Aurender's Conductor.

 

Haven't tried the Allo DigiOne, but have recently started using the Pi2AES product, which is a HAT with outputs for AES, I2S, Spdif, and toslink. It sounds as good as my Node 2i, and for half the price. And, of course, you can use the Ropieee distro to serve as a Roon endpoint, or other OS's. My personal fav. is MoOde.